Language School in Guadalajara (without pictures)

Note from Matt: I've been having a horrible time trying to include pictures, thanks to Blogspot's new broken picture uploader.  Here's the text, and the pictures will hopefully appear later.  

Dear family & friends,

We hope this letter finds you well!  We are doing quite well ourselves and are thankful that the Lord has worked out most things for us.  We are still working towards getting a car, which has been occupying a lot of my time lately, but we are hopeful about that too.  We thought it would be good to tell you a bit more about the language school this week.

The school is almost 45 minutes away in the mornings due to traffic, so we have lots of time to listen to the radio and to try to decipher as much as we can.  Some radio announcers talk very fast!  We are also enjoying listening to some sermons from Canada during the drive.  Those ones, at least, we have no trouble understanding.  :-) 

Here are two pictures of the language school.  The first shows the whole house (the school just rents the bottom one-and-a-half-levels).  The second shows the court inside, which is quite nice.  Note that we're both wearing sweaters!  It can actually get down to 10 degrees in the mornings, which is quite cool considering that there is no central heat.  It's very common to see more winterish coats, scarves, and even touques in the mornings.  But we're not complaining about the weather at all.  The days are absolutely beautiful.  Blue skies, warm sun, but still cool in the shade.  We love it!

Anne-Marie is all by herself in her class.  Apparently there used to be more students, but with the violence elsewhere in Mexico, enrollment has dropped a bit.  But this way Anne-Marie gets lots of practice!  I have two others in my class, Deb from Texas and Courtney from Oregon.  We've really enjoyed getting to know them as friends and sisters in the Lord.  We've gone out a couple of times already for ice-cream and tortas ahogadas, and are planning to make a trip down-town sometime.  (If you don't know what tortas ahogadas are, you'll really have to try some if you ever come to Guadalajara.  It literally means "drowned sandwiches".  They're really quite good!)  Deb and Courtney will be working in a little place in Autlan, Mexico with a Baptist church there. 

The language program is really put together quite well.  The subjects we deal with each day cover quite a wide range: Christianity, Catholicism, food, health, the judicial system, etc.  Did you know, for instance, that the nopale is useful for everything from making adobe stick better to nourishing cows during drought?  We're looking forward to trying some (it's used in some very traditional dishes), though we haven't quite decided how to use it yet.  :-)

As Anne-Marie mentioned before, part of our Spanish homework every other day is to go to find people to ask a couple of questions of.  Something else that works well when you're trying to learn the language is to try to find something that's hard to get.  You often go on a bit of a goose-chase, but it's a good way to meet people.  People are generally very helpful too, which helps a lot.  I went into the Santa Ana center today to try to find a new sink drain plug.  I asked first one man, who sent me to another store, who sent me to another store, which I finally found after some false turns.  But now we have two shining new enchufes in our fregadero, and I've also met some new people!  So little by little, you begin to get to meet the people here. 

So that's it for now.  We've got lots of plans on what to write on, but we're going to try to write on one topic a week.  Thank-you for your letters and thank-you especially for your prayers.  I can say that without a doubt that God has been very good to us, and we are very happy to be here.  We've even had some pretty funny happenings lately!  (But that will have to wait for another time.)  Until then,

Love in Christ, Matt & Anne-Marie Van Dyken.